New York Post: ‘How the Left Protects Its Campus Cartel’

A column by F.H. Buckley in last week’s New York Post explains how the progressive left retains its stranglehold over academia.

Buckley, a professor of law at the Scalia Law School in Arlington, Virginia, argued that American leftists consciously act to retain their dominance over academia. Buckley was writing in response to a recent incident involving the conservative Koch brothers and their alleged involvement in the selection of professors at certain universities.

Buckley points out that ideological donations from the left vastly outnumber those from the right. He provides the example of the Ford Foundation, which has donated almost 10 times more money to universities than the Koch brothers, much of which has gone directly to the creation of women’s studies programs and diversity plans.

Koch support is dwarfed by gifts from institutions with a pronounced liberal agenda, notably the Ford Foundation, whose annual giving to higher ed is almost 10 times that of the Koch Foundation, according to InfluenceWatch.org. Ford was instrumental in creating many schools’ women’s-studies programs, and with its gifts to law schools, Ford helped lay the groundwork for welfare rights and the defense of racial preferences in admissions.

In fact, according to Buckley, donations to higher education from the Koch brothers constitutes only 0.0015 percent of total annual giving to universities and colleges. Despite this, efforts to “UnKoch” universities are growing as donations to leftist ideological causes go unchallenged.

Liberal donors are free to give where they want, and nobody seems to care. What’s shameless, however, is that the same liberal donors that fund left-wing programs in academia also fund the “UnKoch My Campus” protests that urge colleges to turn down Koch support. UnKoch says that it’s simply worried about the influence of wealthy donors on American higher education, but that’s only when they’re conservative. Apparently, liberals think they have property rights in higher ed.